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FreeBSD Foundation Needs Cash For 501(c)3 Status
ashpool7 writes "In an *extremely* late announcement, the FreeBSD foundation has posted in their quarterly newsletter that they're $30,400 short on donations in order to prove that they're a non-profit charity (501(c)3 as they say). If your organization relies upon FreeBSD, it might be a good idea to see if you can scrounge up the $8,000 maximum donation."
Actually if you read what the foundation wrote, you will see that they did so well in large donations that they would loose their charity status which they want to keep. So they are asking for lots of smaller donations.
PS: if I read the ballance sheet right they have about $200K in the bank. Hardly poorly managed
"there are distributions of Linux right now that rival the BSDs' strong points--except for DragonFlyBSD's."
No... Nobody rivals OpenBSD in terms of security features, and the only one that comes close at the moment is NetBSD. Therefore, there are strong points that Linux does not rival.
"Portage is better than the ports system, and other distributions have binary packages pretty well covered (looking at you, Slackware). At this point, about the only reasons one could claim for choosing FreeBSD over Gentoo are the use of PF, the kernel architecture, or personal preference."
I'm sorry, but that's just wrong.
Portage might be better than the ports tree if someone actually did QA on it. They do not. For example, KDE 3.2 went live with a masked dependency, causing the build to fail. If any of the developers had tried it on a stable system, this problem would have been found and fixed easily. Because no one bothered to try it on a stable system it was broken for a week.
Due to that case and others like it, I have concluded that the Gentoo developers do not do significant QA. That makes it unsuitable for production systems. I for one will not bet my livelihood on someone on the Gentoo forums coming up with a hack to fix some problem before a deadline.
FreeBSD has its problems and it might not survive, but let's not pretend Portage is currently a viable alternative to ports.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.